Dekko introduce mental health comics with Rossie Stone

Rossie is dyslexic and spent most of his school years being at the bottom of his classes being seen as stupid by many of his peers.

He has since become the creator and founder of Dekko Comics Ltd, a company that turns schoolwork and win formation into entertaining comic stories. This is based on a technique he came up with for himself towards the end of his school career, which in turn gave him his first grade A in an academic exam.

Rossie has won awards like Young Edge, SME Business Awards and (most recently) The Dyslexia Awards. He has also been nominated for several more such as the National Diversity Award and Dyslexia Awareness Award. He has also been featured on BBC News, STV and having done 3 TEDX Talks — all of which to spread the word of his dream to make education accessible and fun for all, and lose the stigma of “stupidity” that often surrounds those who have neurodiversity.

Dekko Comics are a company that turn wordy information (be it school-related or otherwise) into engaging comic narratives. This is because they understand that words are just one way to communicate, and they believe it’s unfair to expect everyone to learn the same way as each other and be just as good at the same skills. By turning maths, literacy, science and more into comics, they use the comic format to naturally communicate the information with more than just words. They use visuals, break up the information into speech bubbles and panels, use narrative to create natural landmarks, and more.

Confidence is one of the hardest obstacles for a child who is neurodiverse, and their self esteem when they struggle to keep up with and achieve with the rest of their peers in the conventional education system. By giving them a way that is both highly accessible and fun to access the same information, their confidence is boosted drastically. It also gives them the tools and mindset to start accessing more information this way, and Dekko Comics even run workshops to help teach pupils about this and give them ideas of how they can turn their own school work into their own form of entertainment.

Most recently, Dekko Comics have started developing their first DEKKO VIDEO COURSES, which teach how to use these technique in an in-depth way and show how to apply them to multiple different topics: including Creative Study Skills, Confidence with Neurodiversity, Punctuation and Grammar, Times Tables, Mental Health, and more. They will be designed to be particularly helpful for ages 9-14.